Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book (12 page)

“Fuck it.” Bryce
scrambled into the coffin beside me. He landed facing the opposite direction,
with his feet at my head. I lowered the lid.

From the darkness
inside, we could hear the sound of heavy boots hitting the floor and the
shuffling of plastic chairs.

And then something
tapped on the coffin. It sounded like the tip of an assault rifle.

“We checking in here,
too?” asked a voice.

Another set of
footsteps approached.

“I’ve seen way too
much lately to open up another fucking coffin,” said a second voice.

There was a pause.

Finally, the first
voice very quietly said, “Me, too.”

Their boots scraped
away as the men left the room.

“Are they gone?” Bryce
whispered. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

I listened. Another
set of footsteps, softer than the last, was approaching.

“Someone else is
coming.”

Now the softer
footsteps approached the coffin. They stopped right beside it.

We heard something land
on top of the coffin’s lid. There was the sound of someone going through a bag,
and then came the loud, grinding whir of an electric drill.

Someone was screwing
the coffin’s lid shut.

“
Fuck, fuck, fuck
.” Bryce started hyperventilating. He couldn’t
speak any louder than a terrified whisper. He pounded three times on the
coffin’s lid.

Then he stopped. His
body went limp.

He’d passed out.

“Hey!” I yelled. “
Hey!
”

I started pounding on
the lid. It was time to give up. I was ready to get out of this already-overheated,
cramped space. Whatever the military police planned to do couldn’t be any worse
than getting locked inside a coffin.

But the drilling
didn’t stop.

I heard a second screw
bite into the wood and felt the lid tighten. The meager light that had been
making its way beneath the lid dimmed.

I pounded again. “Hey!
I’m in here. I’m
in
here
!”

“Shit,” someone said.
It was a male voice, young—maybe a teenager. “This is a loud one.”

“Don’t listen to it,”
said another voice—another teenager. “You keep forgetting what they said
in training.”

“I didn’t forget. It’s
just loud this time.”

“Well, don’t even
fucking say anything about it. When you say something, it just gets worse. Just
pretend like you don’t hear anything. Let’s get this over with.”

I pounded twice as
hard on the lid. “Let me the
fuck out
!
Someone’s in here! I’m alive!”

The drilling paused.

“It’s an
illusion
, remember?” the second voice said.
“They’re
dead
. They’re not really
conscious. It just seems like they are.
They’re like puppets
,
remember
? The
bodies will die later. If we don’t do this, the disease will keep spreading.
Give me the fucking drill.”

Another screw. Then
another. The lid tightened further. The dim light vanished.

* * *

For a
while, I went into a state of disconnected shock.

I just couldn’t really
believe that this was actually happening. I had this irrational sense that I
was like some character in a video game—I’d lost, but I would just get to
restart from the beginning and try again. There had to be some way out. This
wasn’t how I was going to die.

When I felt them move
the coffin into a vehicle, I started pounding on the lid again and screaming. I
didn’t stop, not even when I heard an engine start and felt us start moving. I
paused only long enough to catch my breath and pull my cellphone out of my
pocket.

In small towns in the
middle of nowhere, coverage is spotty. As soon as you get outside the city
limits, you’re lucky if you get a signal. We were already out of range.

Who would I have
called, anyway? Ian and Shawn were unreachable. My dad? What could he have
done, even if I’d been able to reach him?

I kept pounding and
screaming even though I had no idea whether there was anyone else in the back
of whatever truck or transport vehicle
they
’d put us
in.

Bryce’s legs began to
stir at my shoulders. My head was wedged against his shoe. He was waking up. My
arm was burning from pounding the lid, and I was going hoarse, but I didn’t
stop. When Bryce remembered where he was, he started pounding, too. He was
crying.

I felt the vehicle
make a sharp turn, and then we started jostling over a rough road. We came to a
stop.

There was the sound of
a sliding door opening. Then, in the distance, I heard a large diesel engine
and a slow beeping.

It was a backhoe—I
was certain of it. It sounded just like the one my dad had. The only reason
anyone used a backhoe was to dig large, deep holes.

Bryce started sobbing
harder and pounding the lid ferociously. The wood splintered slightly under his
fist and, for a moment, I had a glimmer of hope. But realistically I knew he’d never
be able to break through. My dad was a good carpenter. The coffin was too
strong.

“
Fuck you! Fuck you!
” Bryce was sobbing. His legs were flailing
around, knocking into my shoulders. “
Fuck
you!
” he screamed again and again.

We felt the coffin
being lifted by the backhoe. Someone must have put a rope or a strap around it,
because we started swaying.

Then we felt ourselves
being lowered. We dropped farther and farther down, before the coffin finally came
to a rest.

Neither of us stopped
pounding and screaming. “
Please!
” I
heard myself shouting. “
Pleeeeease
!”
I said it over and over again.

Then there came a
deafening
whuuuf
as the backhoe dumped hundreds of pounds of dirt over the lid. The coffin
jolted. The wood creaked. There was another
whuuf
of falling dirt, this one
muted and barely audible.

And then there was
only silence.

* * *

For a long
time, neither of us spoke.

Bryce cried to himself
quietly.

A little while later,
I felt him slip a hand under my knees. He drew a deep, shaky breath in the
darkness. He wrapped both of his arms around my legs, hugging them. He was kind
of like a little boy hugging a teddy bear in the middle of a dark night.

It’s hard to explain
what I felt then. Mostly I didn’t want to think about the reality of what was
happening, so maybe I was in denial. I don’t know, but there’s just something
about the presence of the last human being you’ll ever be with in the world.
You share something with that person that no one else could ever understand.

I put my hand on
Bryce’s knee, and then I hugged my arms around his legs, too.

For a moment,
claustrophobia seized me intensely. But I closed my eyes so the darkness
wouldn’t be as consuming and forced myself to pretend that I was just lying in
bed beneath thick sheets.

What I’m going to say
next will sound absolutely crazy and probably perverse, but when you’re
desperate to escape a horrific experience, you find a way.

I felt for Bryce’s
belt buckle in the darkness.

I unclasped it and then
unbuttoned his jeans.

He froze. His entire
body went rigid.

I’m small, and the
coffin was made for a large person, so I was able to bend my knees a little and
maneuver myself lower in the narrow space.

I reached into Bryce’s
underwear and brushed my fingers through the coils of his pubic hair. Then,
very gently, I slipped my fingers around his penis. It was warm. I could feel
his heartbeat.

His breathing deepened.
He squeezed my legs tighter.

I was terrified of
dying, but part of me felt more alive than ever. Waves of obliterating
attraction passed from my lips to my knees. I didn’t want to think about anything
other than Bryce’s warm body.

He shifted his weight,
scooting his body around so that he could move his head inside my knees. Then
he put his hand between my legs. I rotated my pelvis and pushed back against
his touch.

I pulled his pants and
underwear down around his thighs as fast as I could and put his penis in my
mouth. For a moment, all I could think about was making him come. If I could just
focus on this and the pressure of his fingertips between my legs, then it
didn’t matter where I was.

He was breathing
harder now and moving his hips very, very gently.

I felt him unbutton my
pants and, in one sudden motion, he straightened my legs, pulled my pants and
underwear together down to my ankles, and spread my thighs.

His breath was
suddenly on my naked vagina. Very softly, I felt his tongue begin to trace my
labia. In the next moment it twisted around my clitoris.

I couldn’t help but
let out a gasp. His hands spread around my waist and down over my butt. I
squeezed his penis, slid my lips over it again, and matched the rhythm of his
tongue.

I came before he did.

For a moment, I wasn’t
trapped inside a narrow box. For a moment, my world wasn’t in pieces. For a
moment, I was just a girl again. Unafraid. Alive.

He came right after.
He must have been waiting for me. I felt his semen flow across my tongue. I
squeezed my grip around his penis as tightly as I could. I hoped I’d made him
feel as happy for a moment as he’d made me feel; I hoped I’d let him escape.

I held his semen in my
mouth and tried to catch my breath. In a moment of strange, irrational self-preservation,
I thought about Mr. Hershel and the horrific infestation of larvae that had
filled his skull cavity; the illness that had almost killed Morgan soon after
she’d been attacked; the body I’d help Ian carry from the locker room; and what
the boy who’d locked us into the coffin had said about keeping the “disease”
from spreading.

And I quietly spit out
Bryce’s semen.

I knew I was about to
die anyway. I’d already had sex with Bryce—maybe even without a condom—and
if he was carrying whatever terrifying disease that was causing people to act
so bizarrely, he may have already passed it to me…or maybe I’d even passed it
to him. Either way, there was some part of me that wouldn’t let go of any
chance to stay alive, no matter how small it was.

Bryce hugged my legs
again and rested his head on my inner thigh.

“I don’t want to die,”
he whispered. He was no longer crying. It was just a simple, quiet statement.

I pulled one of his
knees up and lay my head on it. I rested my hand on his leg and very softly rubbed
my thumb back and forth, just to let him know I was still there, and awake.

He reached for my hand
in the darkness and held on to it.

I clicked on my phone,
squinting in the sudden glare of the screen. I kept it on just long enough to
see that there was only 2 percent of the battery left, and no reception to
speak of.

I turned off the
screen, lay my head back down on Bryce’s knee, and tried to prepare myself to
die.

It occurred to me that
if I kept turning on my phone, soon it wouldn’t turn back on. After that I
wouldn’t ever see any kind of light again.

January 20
^th
, 2014

2:58 a.m.

Author’s Update

Now that I’ve finally
finished Part 3, I feel like I could sleep for a day straight. I might just do
that, in fact.
As soon as I post this.
I don’t have to
go school, so why not? I’ll start Part 4 when I wake up.

Anyway, I really hope everyone liked the third
part of
Dead in Bed
. A lot happens in
it, and it’s the longest segment yet. As always, feel totally free to tweet @
BaileySimms
with any questions. You can ask me anything
except for what happens next! I can’t give the ending away.

Some of you messaged me asking about “Kyle.” I
guess I should stop using quotes and just get used to the pseudonym.

Honestly, things could be better with Kyle. I
think I made a mistake.

I know I shouldn’t be writing about this, even if
I’m not using our real names, but I don’t have anyone to tell, not even my best
friend—for reasons which maybe I’ll try to explain later, but not now.
And I don’t think I can stand keeping it all inside and not sharing it with
anybody.

So, my dad finally turned our
internet
back on. I told him I need it for a school project. Luckily he let me write all
week without saying anything. As long as he doesn’t see what I’m actually working
on, I think I’ll be okay for now. But Kyle didn’t know this. He was so sweet on
Friday—he showed up again and parked across the street in case I needed
to use his
iPad
Wi-Fi. It was pretty late when I got
his text, almost midnight. But I wasn’t asleep.

I’d been so irritated with my dad, and so sick of
being stuck at home all day, and so
bored
,
I kind of climbed out my window to go say hi to Kyle. My doctor would kill me
if he knew, but I made it over the sill without hurting myself.

Kyle was really surprised to see me. He definitely
didn’t expect it. He was happy, I could tell, but he was worried I’d get in
trouble, too. We sat and listened to music for a while.

And then he kissed me. We’d never, ever kissed
before. I had
so
many butterflies in
my stomach when he leaned over.

But that’s when I made my mistake. I kind of…gave
him a blowjob (I hate that word, but I don’t know what else to call it). I’d
never given one before, and I’m almost seventeen. It wasn’t just because I
needed to write the scene with Ashley and Bryce Tripp in the coffin and I
didn’t really know how, in case you’re thinking that. It wasn’t just, like, research.
I really like Kyle. A lot. And after he kissed me, I just wanted something else
to happen. I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to make Kyle feel good. I wanted
to make him feel at least as good as he makes me feel every time he texts me.

He kept telling me I didn’t have to do it, which
kind of bothered me because he must have thought I felt obligated or something.
When it was over, he got kind of distant and said he should go. He squeezed my
hand. He was so worried that I was going to get in trouble. But…I don’t know.
He was just acting weird. Like, not the same Kyle as before.

The worst part is my dad
found out he’d been parking outside our house. Thank God he didn’t catch me
sneaking out—I’m sure he didn’t because I’d be in
so
much trouble by now if he’d seen me. But what he did do was call
Kyle’s mom and tell her to keep her son from “lurking” around our house. It was
so embarrassing.

Anyway. I texted Kyle afterward, and he still
hasn’t gotten back to me. That was two nights ago. He probably hates me.
I’m really
,
really scared I ruined
everything
. I’m sure he thinks I’m a slut. I know I made a really huge
mistake. I don’t know why I did it. I’m so, so sorry (I wish Kyle could just
read this and see how sorry I am).

I’ve decided the best thing to do is focus on
writing Part 4. After I get some sleep, that is. I’m actually really excited
about what’s coming up next.

Thanks for reading!

xxBailey